Putting usable intelligence into multimedia applications

Traditionally usability holds the status of an art applied by limited, highly expert scientists and engineers intended to enhance the design of hardware and software for the ultimate benefit of the end user. In the creation of human computer interfaces, the usability engineer (or should we say interface artist) has at her disposal a number of techniques ranging from Wizard of Oz experiments to cognitive complexity analyses to help determine the ideal interface to an application. In this position paper, we claim two basic points. First, that systems are rapidly increasing in complexity and breadth of use that even interface artists are no longer able to predict the range and contexts of uses of these systems and thus have an increasingly difficult task of creating interfaces to serve a range of users and situations. Secondly, we claim that increasing intelligence in both the interface and applications will ultimately wield this application complexity. We illustrate this with examples from intelligent multimedia interfaces and an innovative multimedia news understanding domain. We conclude by sketching a new approach to interface instrumentation and evaluation currently being explored at MITRE that promises a methodology for advancement